by svale » Wed 10 Oct 2018 16:28 GMT
OK, my recent experience with Air Malta has been good and bad. First of all the website lies. It infers that you can take your pet from the UK as excess baggage (at a cost of £150). I must admit that I disbelieved this and phoned AIR Malta customer service to check. After assurances that this was OK and you could choose any flight, I booked. The problem is that you have to book your own flight before you can book any ticket as excess baggage. Anyway, luckily I did book myself as an open ticket. 3 days later (and quite a few telephone calls) Air Malta got in touch to say that no space was available anywhere until January.
After trying quite a few pet transport companies, every company gave me different information and prices. The cheapest was £750 (BTW my dog is a medium size cocker spaniel) and nearly every company said that a Monday am flight from Gatwick was almost the only option. That said, I got some really poor information. Typically that informing the Malta government was unnecessary. When I questioned one company who wanted to offer me a night flight from Heathrow, they insisted that the veterinary check was precleared (I asked whether the vet would be available at 1:00 am).
Anyway, back to Air Malta. It took me a call to Air Malta in Malta to get the correct phone no for Air Malta cargo UK. When I finally got in touch with a nice lady called Stefania Billikova, she couldn't have been more helpful and sorted me out.
First of all, Air Malta encourages you to travel on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday because there is less cargo on these days. Stef booked Dusty on my preferred flight of Thursday morning from Heathrow. She helped me with all the forms and gave them personally to the cargo people. By this time (together with my permanent move to Malta), I had rampant paranoia. She couldn't have been more helpful and really indulged me.
At the end of the day, the most painful part was the £550 cargo fee. You have to book your pet into cargo 4 hours beforehand but this went smoothly as did the pickup from Air Malta cargo in Malta (not that a fee about €41 is payable cash - no cards accepted at the Malta end)